Beyond the “Death of God”: The New Indestructible Humanity without a Model by Sarah Kofman

Abstract

For many 20th century philosophers, the “death of God” became an opportunity to rethink the limits of the human, eliminating its claims to a transcendent foundation in order to start again, more modestly, “from below”. The new humanity, freed from the burdens of the old metaphysics, becomes able to reappropriate responsibility, rediscovering in the other an irreducible presence. The human and philosophical story of Sarah Kofman offers the possibility of following an original development in this sense, starting from the unspeakable event of the Shoah towards a new possibility for human kind.

1. The Terms of the Challenge

What is the real challenge behind the momentous event of the “death of God”? Is it a true historical event, or rather, can we reduce it to a mere philosophical exercise? Is it an event that remains confined within Western metaphysics, or rather, does it extend its shadow over the entire world?

The challenge of the death of God stands as a real limine in the history of contemporary thought, but it is not only this. The death of God as absence, impossibility of description or domination—ineffability, in fact—lies at the basis of many mystical and religious visions of the past. What then changes in the present? What are the factors that determine the actual metamorphosis of the present? This seemingly simple question forces us to investigate the question by starting from a precise point, forcibly restricting our field of enquiry given the immense fortune and the number of authors who have wondered about this.

While it is true that the “death of God” has had a cathartic and liberating effect for many thinkers, one must nevertheless question the reasons for this shift. What was blocking them before? How, for example, is the liberating effect related to those authors who were not previously in the position of a believer? Why, indeed, should anything have changed for those who never believed in the existence of God?

Certainly, this is not a strictly religious issue but a metaphysical structure that, in fact, projects the meaning of things into a transcendental dimension, thus emptying the world.

So, if we remove this metaphysical scaffolding, what is left standing? This is indeed the great challenge also for Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in the death of God, indicates precisely the final seal of the long and articulate genealogy that made him capable of dismantling the concepts, morality and eschatological dimension of Western thought.

In this contribution, I would like to try to give a partial answer to these many questions through the work of an important thinker of the last century who was able to respond to this renewed horizon of meaning, completely shifting the weight of the question, without attempting to reconstruct new metaphysical or religious solutions, but rather, returning to a necessary practice of the human that translates into openness to the other. We are talking about Sarah Kofman (1934–1994), a French philosopher who sought, in her complex and innovative work, to reconstruct the humanity of the human, without the need for further frills and without the need to invoke the arrival of any god.

For this reason, it will be necessary to first proceed to a delimitation of the field, as we cannot cover all the numerous declinations of our initial problem; thus, we immediately identify certain themes and authors that are more useful to the path we wish to propose.

2. The End Is Only the Beginning

Is it not the case that wanting to reconstruct a new theology at all costs amounts to an implicit judgement of negativity with respect to the new situation we find ourselves in?

Can we not rightly see its more creative side? Can we not understand this new state as a dimension of regained health which allows us to play again with the seriousness of a child?

The question of the real nature of God’s death is, in fact, an absolutely fundamental one because it is necessary to understand fully what kind of “death” it is.

What we can say with certainty is that this is not the first death of God; certainly, Nietzsche was not the first to make this daring proclamation. The death of God is a fundamental moment in theology; in fact, it is good to keep in mind that this is precisely what “substantiates” the existence of God. If Jesus is indeed God incarnate, it is only through his death and resurrection that it becomes possible to experience his truth. The death of God is therefore the true salvation for man.

Why then there is so much scandal in Nietzsche’s announcement? What makes it so unprecedented? Probably, what lies before, the genealogy, and what lies after, the critique, leads not to resurrection but instead leads to a return to the sense of the earth.

If we want to start again with Nietzsche, we can take the opportunity to return to the text, leaving the enormous mass of secondary literature in the background, as Karl Löwith rightly advised [1]. By placing texts and posthumous fragments in parallel, we have the opportunity to find certain passages that are perhaps not so valued in this reading path.

While attempting to keep to this commitment, we cannot entirely avoid naming some famous positions when dealing with this theme, referring back to the texts, because, in fact, they crowd the contemporary philosophical imagination like ghosts.

The death of God and nihilism, which characterize the age of contemporary disenchantment, certainly find their greatest expression in Nietzsche’s voice, but in fact refer to a long and complex process that pervades modern thought.

Although I am aware of the enormous importance of the subject, I consider it useful to avoid a reconstruction of the illustrious precedents in order to focus on a very precise line of interpretation, which sees in Karl Löwith an extremely interesting alternative to the classic Heidegger precisely because of his ability to show in Nietzsche’s words not so much a reconstruction of metaphysics but a truly different way of doing philosophy.

For this reason, I will refer to a fundamental essay by Franco Volpi [2] to reconstruct, in brief, a history of the term (but also the concept of) “nihilism”. Nihilism is, in fact, the other name for the death of God, if we identify in God the primum, the perfect entity that underlies the entire Western metaphysical approach. The boundaries are difficult to draw and continually blur philosophy and religion, faith and reason, into a huge conceptual lump. Losing the principle, therefore, means losing everything. As Nietzsche said: “Nihilism: the goal is lacking; an answer to the ‘Why?’ is lacking. What does nihilism mean?—That the highest values are devaluated” [3] (p. 146). If the very nature of nihilism is thus the lack of an answer, the impossibility of a fundamental truth as the outcome of the search, then perhaps it is worth recalling Volpi’s warning when he states that “We nurture the same conviction towards nihilism that applies to all real philosophical problems: they have no solution, they have history instead” [2] (p. 7)1.

Nihilism is an “advancing desert” that devours everything it encounters, annihilating it. Nietzsche, however, is not the sole creator of this definition, but one of the interpreters of this movement—one might say, spontaneous of the West—which involutes upon itself and falls into different forms of destructive nihilism. We can reconstruct this panorama precisely by following the stages of the investigation that the German philosopher has been carrying out more or less since 1880, when we begin to find this term in his notes of the many readings of more- or less-well-known thinkers, such as Schopenhauer, but also von Hartmann, Bahnsen or Mainländer, in whom he finds this theme developed in a very radical way [2] (pp. 40–41). And it is precisely in Philipp Mainländer that we find the first formulation of the famous saying made famous by Nietzsche [4] (I, p. 108). However, as Volpi emphasises, “What killed God, according to Mainländer, was not mankind, it was not us, as Nietzsche would affirm, but it is God himself who gives himself death following his inherent impulse to pass from being to nothingness” [2] (p. 41)2.

In addition to reading this author, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy [5] (p. 179), as well as the French writer, Paul Bourget, are also fundamental readings for Nietzsche. This is a peculiar cultural historical moment, where nihilism pervades philosophical, psychological and, not least, literary discussion, where it acquires a particular charisma, precisely because, in a certain sense, it brings to fruition some of the tendencies already rooted in Romantic aesthetics, so well-known to the German philosopher. Giuliano Campioni has revealed and reconstructed the multiple readings of Nietzsche, who was always eager for knowledge and novelty, which led him to dive enthusiastically into the discovery of authors, driven by an “instinct of affinity” [6]. With regard to Bourget, for example, the philosopher’s reading is immediately attracted by the breadth of application of the category of nihilism, which is used by the writer and literary critic as a tool for analyzing the present time, certainly from an aesthetic point of view, but also from a moral one. Indeed, faced with what the French writer defines as a decaying society, “Bourget considers the moralist’s and the politician’s point of view to be legitimate, since they produce “reactions” to the forces of decadence, but he believes that only another point of view, the “psychological” one, is capable of seeing decadence in a positive light and grasping the “aesthetic values” it expresses—a motif, too, echoed by Nietzsche” [2] (p. 45)3. If there are many echoes, there are just as many grounds for criticism that the philosopher then comes to formulate at the end of an intense period of research. This theoretical work is necessary to arrive at the identification of the fundamental differences between active and passive nihilism, as well as the founding question of the spirit of décadence. Certainly, nothing comparable from the point of view of analysis can be found in Bourget, but the description of the context helps to stimulate further investigation in Nietzsche [6] (pp. 241–242). As Volpi again points out, “One motif in particular Nietzsche seemingly touched upon: the one according to which décadence is characterized by the physiological dissolution of the organism and the disintegration of the parts that detach themselves from the whole and become independent of it” [2] (p. 49)4.

The disintegration of the whole, the loss of the unitary sense of the world, the dissolution, are themes that will become fundamental in the discussion of the outcomes of the death of God, but they are also the strengths of many contemporary interpretations, such as that of Sarah Kofman, to which we will return.

3. The Crisis of a World, Nihilism and the Like

The implicit assumption of all our reasoning, which must now be made explicit, is that Nietzsche works as a fine interpreter of what is surely a widespread conception, a feeling of the time that is coming to terms, at the end of the 19th century, with a series of depletions of meaning due to innumerable elements that were progressively adding up, thus determining a fracture. The independence of rationalism, science and its omnipotent vision of nature and man, new discoveries and new theories; everything contributes to showing the blatant insufficiency of an explanation of the world that, by now, no longer has the power to enchant and convince. What Nietzsche places under his microscope is already a completely disintegrated world, which shows its dissolution in different ways, and which in no case can be brought back to unity.

As we have already made clear, we will only use a few critical passages to mark the distance of certain outcomes in order to prepare the theoretical ground on which we will then position our discourse.

Almost always, the problem of God’s death is approached from the point of view of the outcome, of what can actually arise from such a radical assumption of metaphysical critique, in a sense reading this event more as loss than as passage. What remains after the erasure of God? If we only grasp the destructive side of this movement of thought, the outcome is certainly a radical one, and there are many authors who, accepting this indication, have tried to answer the German philosopher’s question, such as Junger or Heidegger. However, we must never forget that, however authoritative these voices may be, they are, in any case, just interpretations, which do not set themselves to any philological task but rather to a theoretical one. With this in mind, it seems to us that it is increasingly necessary to always go back to the Nietzschean text, regarding it as a fundamental touchstone, without fear of contradicting other authoritative voices.

Among the many 20th-century interpreters who have confronted Nietzsche’s thought, Martin Heidegger certainly deserves to be remembered for the radicalism of his long and fruitful confrontation. We can state, without fear of being mistaken, that the comparison with Nietzsche’s philosophy has, above all, the function of clarifying Heidegger’s work, of clarifying its meaning within contemporary philosophy, to help him account for a productive capacity of nihilism that appears indispensable in his eyes in order not to lose the sense of doing philosophy.

As Franco Volpi recalls:

The results he achieved stand out in the panorama of interpretations that occurred in the 20th century. In a masterly and imposing interrogation of the texts, he has succeeded in tracing the contours of an interpretation that connects Nietzsche’s fundamental doctrines into a coherent whole and brings them back into the mainstream of Western philosophy. And he does so by assigning them an invisible watershed function—between the completion of metaphysics and a new beginning—[…] At the same time, Nietzsche has become for Heidegger a decisive term of comparison regarding the ‘thing itself’ that is questioned in thought.

[2] (p. 84)5

Ultimately, for Heidegger, Nietzsche’s thought, his call for the death of God and the nihilistic outlook that derives from this, are nothing but the ultimate outcome of the development of metaphysical thought, their fulfillment. Not a radical rupture but a total and annihilating closure. Heidegger takes the commitment and the most uncomfortable statements of Nietzschean thought very seriously, believing that the only way to overcome the impasse created by nihilism is to “Let the immense power of nothingness unleash itself and let all the possibilities of nihilism be exhausted to their essential fulfillment” [2] (p. 119)6.

This exhaustion serves to prepare the solution of Gelassenheit, a calm waiting, an abandonment to what is to come in order to save the individual who can no longer find any meaning, any unity. So, it is not strange that his interpretation of Nietzsche sees him as the one who prepares a new sense of the divine. But maybe this is not his true meaning.

For Heidegger, in fact,

Nietzsche knew and experienced nihilism because he himself thought nihilistically. Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism is itself nihilistic. Consequently, in spite of all his insights, he could not recognize the hidden essence of nihilism, because right from the outset, solely on the basis of valutative thought, he conceived of nihilism as a process of the devaluation of the uppermost values. Nietzsche had to conceive of nihilism that way because in remaining on the path and within the realm of Western metaphysics, he thought it to its conclusion.

In no sense did Nietzsche interpret nihilism as a process of devaluating the uppermost values merely because valutative thought played a role in the course of his education or in his “private” views and positions. Valutative thought played this part in Nietzsche’s thought because Nietzsche thought metaphysically, on the path of the history of metaphysics. But it is no accident that valutative thought took precedence in metaphysics, at the core of Western philosophy.

[7] (pp. 22–23)

Indeed, Heidegger’s intent is precisely to delineate Nietzsche’s position as the last of the metaphysicians [8].

Certainly, he is not the only one to follow this interpretation, since even those who read in Nietzsche’s nihilism the first element of a reconstruction of a new divine, in reality, do not deviate much from this position. However, among the great interpreters, it seems interesting to return to a name perhaps overlooked by most, but one who is certainly a solid interpreter of the ubermensch philosopher’s thought: Karl Löwith.

4. “Nietzsche as Philosopher of Our Age and Eternity”

Karl Löwith devoted a great deal of attention to the German philosopher, interpreting him as the axis of a profound transformation in contemporary thought, in valuable and very rich essays, such as From Hegel to Nietzsche. The revolutionary fracture in 19th century thought (1941), but also God, Man and the World in Metaphysics from Descartes to Nietzsche (1967).

Löwith had already extensively analyzed the figure of Nietzsche in his 1941 essay, seeing him as the true initiator of something absolutely new on the contemporary scene. Löwith highlights among the outcomes of the total crisis of Christianity and its repercussions in philosophy, the creation of a very clear shift towards a new anthropology because, as he himself makes clear,

Philosophy becomes anthropological to the same extent that man emancipates himself from the divine cosmos of the Greeks and the supernatural God of the Bible, and finally takes upon himself the creation of the human world. At the end of such a liberation from everything that might constitute a constraint, lies Nietzsche’s unique attempt to reclaim the pre-Christian world through the doctrine of the Superman, which arises at the same time as the waning of God and teaches the eternal return of a self-willed world, to which Nietzsche—describing it as ‘Dionysian’—recognizes a divine character.

[1] (pp. 4–5)7

For the interpreter, the whole question of the death of God fits, albeit in its specific declinations, into a general crisis of modernity that invariably also engulfs the world and mankind, not just God. This is because “he who speaks of God is thereby saying something about the world and man, for example that both are, unlike God, not a se but entia creata” [1] (p. 5)8. However, there is not only this kind of consequential relationship, where God is the origin of everything else; Löwith immediately goes on to clarify, “Whoever speaks of man automatically says something about the world and God, for example that man too is a product of the world of nature and not an image of God” [1] (p. 5)9.

However, for Löwith, the crisis of modernity that leads to the death of God is not unfailingly structured as an internal episode in the history of metaphysics, or as the necessary recreation of a new dimension of the divine; there is a different direction that Nietzsche himself attempts to take.

Löwith’s interpretation on this point differs considerably from Heidegger’s since it takes into account a fundamental context of reference, forgotten by many other interpreters, namely, a concept of the world typical of the ancient Greek mentality, to which Nietzsche, on the other hand, refers explicitly in the formulation of his radical ideas of eternal return.

The context here is defined by Heraclitus’ Fragment 30 [9] (p. 107), in which the universal order depends neither on gods nor men but persists thanks to its own “just measure”, which allows it to change without ever disappearing [1] (p. 6). We know how Nietzsche always praised the splendid wisdom of the Greeks, and this image of the world is certainly no stranger to this appreciation. Is not the figure of Dionysus sparagmos another mask of this physis, which remains beyond and below all individual life?

Let us take another theoretical step with Löwith, which will be instrumental in constructing our argument. As Orlando Franceschelli writes in the introduction, the Löwith text examined

In its original reality, as the one and all existing by nature, the world ‘is positively, self-consistent, like all physis’. Which of course does not exclude that, within such an eternal totality, innumerable solar systems arise and perish. This, as we shall see, is the Heraclitean or Dionysian vision that Nietzsche sought to repropose after Kant. And which, ultimately, Spinoza’s natura naturans had already regained before Kant.

[10] (XV)10

It is precisely the reference to Spinoza that is extremely interesting, considering its subterranean presence in Nietzsche’s work; Nietzsche, despite his many criticisms of the metaphysical construction of the Spinozian system, remains evidently attracted to a thought that was able to reduce man to complete naturalness, without losing his distinctiveness, as well as emphasizing his necessary implication in the meshes of the natural, while not demeaning his ability to be free. In short, he managed to bring freedom and necessity together. All of this typically Spinozian sentiment forms the backdrop to the reductio of God to Nature, where, however, not only is sense not lost, but the true “sense of the earth”, as Nietzsche called it, is returned.

In a famous letter to his friend Overbeck, dated 30 July 1881, Nietzsche writes

I am really amazed, really delighted! I have a precursor, and what precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: what brought me to him now was the guidance of instinct. Not only is his whole tendency like my own—to make knowledge the most powerful passion—but also in five main points of his doctrine I find myself; this most abnormal and lonely thinker is closest to me in these points precisely: he denies free will, purposes, the moral world order, the non egoistical, evil; of course in differences are enormous, but they are differences more of period, culture, field of knowledge.

[11] (n. 89, p. 177)

This further passage through Spinoza’s philosophy is fundamental for Löwith, who goes as far as to state that “The death of God opens, through nihilism, the way to the rediscovery of the world” [1] (p. 139)11 precisely because every God who falls also drags with him, in the ruinous collapse, a certain idea of man, which has always welded its meaning with that of the divine principle. So, if we still want to answer the question of the “sense” of the human, the only way to do so without falling into reactionary and passive nihilism is to “return to the sense of the earth”. As Löwith writes, “In place of the imitatio Christi comes the attempt to assimilate man to the overall character of the life of the world. Man must overcome himself in order not to end up in the nullity of nihilism […] He must overcome ‘God and nothingness’” [1] (p. 135)12. It is at this point that the Greek alternative comes in, which conceives of nature as a principle completely independent of the divine, triumphant even over everything else. This uncreated, sempiternal nature is the natura naturans, whose portrait Spinoza has defined so well; it is a unique principle that, in its making, is able to save the unity of the whole and the particularity of the individual, describing a dynamic of development where desire directs the will in its constant growth. Indeed, as Nietzsche writes in On the Genealogy of Morals, “For Spinoza the world had stepped back again into that innocence in which it had lain before the invention of the bad conscience” [12] (p. 55), [13].

The result of God’s death is thus a return to the sense of the earth, which does not necessarily imply the reconstruction of a new dimension of the divine but, instead, brings back into the world the sense of things, which thus, once again, become important in their own right. It is a matter of developing the capacity to grasp the perfection of the whole of which the “tremendous moment” [14] (§ 341, p. 194) represents the culmination. Spinoza, in fact, is capable of erasing finalism.

5. Sarah Kofman beyond the Shoah: Return to the Human

If we follow this interpretive track, we find in the death of God not only an epochal event but a real, new opportunity for the human being who, returning to the bosom of nature and no longer in opposition to it, can find himself at peace with the oscillating rhythm of his sentient body. Certainly, this is not a peace devoid of anguish and suffering but a stillness due to the cessation of the metaphysical opposition of body and mind. There is nothing to fight, but rather, there is something true to be welcomed in its diversity. Life and death return to indicate a dynamic of renewal rather than loss.

How does this translate into a feeling of connection with others? When and how can an ethical connection arise that makes us accountable to others? This remains the biggest question from which also arises the most interesting perspective, that of a renewed sense of response to the other.

It is precisely on this question that the latest production by Sarah Kofman, an extraordinary interpreter of Nietzsche and Freud, but also a child of the tragedy of the Shoah, focuses especially in an attempt to find a common thread that can stitch her personal history to History.

Sarah Kofman’s philosophy is closely intertwined with the tradition of Western philosophical and literary thought, of which she remains one of the most interesting and innovative interpreters, especially for her ability to bring out “the removed” within it. As Stefania Tarantino has rightly observed, “Sarah Kofman acutely distinguishes what philosophers have said from what they have done through their systems” [15] (p. 27)13, unmasking implicit biases.

Certainly, her predilection goes to certain authors, first and foremost Nietzsche and Freud, but also to other thinkers, such as Socrates, Kant and Rousseau, who, although less in tune with her feelings, are analyzed at length [16]. However, the origin of everything and the decision to devote oneself to philosophy are grafted onto the most disruptive and suffocating event of the 20th century, the Shoah. The choice of philosophy occurs—we might say—as an antidote to the event of the Shoah, which Sarah, while still a child, experiences due to the capture and deportation of her father, Rabbi Berek Kofman, who will never return from Auschwitz [17] (pp. 67–74).

Her story becomes known après coup, when Kofman has by then constructed her own destiny as a philosopher and academic thanks to a small autobiographical book, Rue Ordener, rue Labat, which precedes the philosopher’s suicide by a few months [16] (pp. 329–356).

In the narrated story, Sarah begins by recounting the culmination of her own trauma, namely, the abduction of her father by the Nazis in July 1942 during the Vel d’Hiv raids.

Sarah’s father chooses not to escape his fate, warns the Jews in his community, allowing them to flee, and finally offers himself in place of his own family, leaving his wife and six children alive, albeit alone forever.

They go. All six of us find ourselves in the street, huddled together, sobbing loudly and screaming. When for the first time I read in a Greek tragedy the famous lament ‘ahinoi, ahinoi, ahinoi’, I cannot help but think of this scene from my childhood, in which six children abandoned by their father could only cry out between sobs, and with the certainty that they would never see him again: ‘O father, father, father”.

[18] (pp. 13–14)14

The father’s arrest is almost an abandonment, which initiates the daughter’s destiny. Sarah and her mother find refuge in a neighbor’s house, “the lady from rue Labat”, a Christian woman whom she soon begins to call “granny”, mémé.

Forced cohabitation, however, becomes a silent battle between the two women, as the woman who shelters them tries to change her, tearing her away from her religion, changing her hairstyle and diet, which she deems not nutritious for a growing child. Sarah is fascinated by this woman, who makes her feel special, spoiling her with small gifts and offering her a few hours of leisure in the frightful days of war. The mother must remain hidden, so she cannot resist this seduction. The only way she can find is to exert violent punishments and prohibitions, increasingly losing her daughter’s affection and permanently distancing her from the Jewish religion.

Well before understanding, Sarah feels that it is no longer possible to believe in the spontaneous and reassuring way she had learned from her father, relying on the religious precepts that had filled her childhood. I find it very interesting that the philosopher insists on the affective dimension of religious belief, which is almost never about orthodoxy but rather about “home”, a place that makes one feel at peace and safe. Surely this childhood episode constitutes her “death of God” in a much more literal sense than one might believe: a total loss of meaning and an inability to reconstruct another. Sarah, while deeply loving her mother, inexorably distances herself from her because she comes to embody an orthodoxy that is afraid of her daughter’s intellectual autonomy and does not accept her hunger for independence and willingness to study.

The “death of God” can be said to pass first of all through this destruction of the sense of religion in which little Sarah had always found herself living. If the father has been taken, never to return, it means perhaps that nothing can be looked upon with the same confidence any more. It is at this point that Sarah encounters philosophy.

Sarah became passionate about reading and philosophy through the books given to her by mémé, that strange second mother figure that fate gave her.

I had to return to my mother, in the Langlois impasse, not knowing what hell I was going through for the two years of preparation for my diploma, in horrible material conditions, fighting every day to be able to continue with high school and do my homework. […] Every night my mother cut off my electric light; I remember reading Sartre’s The Paths of Freedom under the covers with the help of a torch. By the end of those two years, I had lost seven kilos and stopped all religious practice.

[18] (pp. 97–98)15

Philosophy thus really amounts to the discovery of a path of freedom that, throughout her life, allows her to find herself again through the many lectures in her courses, her books and discussions with friends and students. There remains, however, a constant background, the story of her father that is not yet closed, resolved in a memory. The father disappeared without an explanation, without a return of the body that would have brought closure. A father swallowed up by History, like a being without a name.

Since we cannot, for obvious reasons of space, recount this fundamental passage in Kofman’s philosophical story [19], we will only attempt to outline a constellation of references, and I will focus on a few passages, in particular the one that engages with her autobiography, revealing to us a completely new field of reconstruction of the human.

Sarah Kofman has constructed her philosophy by means of a thought that grafts itself onto the authors she has tackled in order to erode them from within; her approach is profoundly Nietzschean and is based on taste and consonance, taste and music. We find in her no academic obsequiousness but an insolent reading that manages to unmask the unspoken in thought. A great interpreter of Nietzsche and Freud, Kofman seems to have truly saved herself through the exercise of thought, putting the horror of her childhood at a critical distance.

Before Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, little was known of the philosopher’s biographical story, or rather, not even her friends were aware of the details. However, almost suddenly, encountering Nietzsche’s philosophy, but also Freud’s thought [20,21], brought her back and, in a way, forced her to confront the question of Judaism, of her own belonging to Judaism, and thus of her father’s death.

In 1987, Sarah Kofman published an extraordinary book on the question of the memory of the camps, on the necessity of testimony and on the stifled word that cannot be said, Stifled Words. The text bears the dedication to her father, to Maurice Blanchot and Robert Antelme; indeed, these will be the interlocutors of her discourse, which, through the lens of literature, succeeds where philosophy seems to trudge [22].

If Auschwitz is neither a concept nor a pure word but a name beyond nomination (or, in Lyotard’s language, a name that designates that which has no name in speculation, the name of the anonymous, the name of that which remains without result and without benefit for the speculative), then it is incumbent upon me, as Jewish intellectual who survived the Holocaust, to pay homage to Blanchot for these fragments on Auschwitz scattered throughout his texts, a writing of ashes, a writing of disaster that avoids the trap of complicity with speculative knowledge, with what in it is power, and is therefore complicit with the torturers of Auschwitz.

[21] (pp. 13–14)16

One of the fundamental elements that prevents one from finding meaning in the events of Auschwitz is precisely the death of God; that is, the impossibility of finding meaning in what has happened, where every measure, every hierarchy of value, seems to disappear. Man is stripped of all possible anthropological definitions, which, on the other hand, found their prop precisely in anthropocentric metaphysics. What is man? Why could this happen, especially to those who tried to “be good”? Like Sarah Kofman’s father, who was hit with a spade and buried alive for wanting to celebrate Shabbat. How can words tell all this?

The philosopher’s problem is precisely that of having to restore meaning to the philosophical word, because as Kofman says, the word must no longer be that of the concept, powerful and definitive, but must renounce the “clarity of the day”, to become, rather like the word of narration, a possibility of meaning, a word of the basic sharing of a residual humanism, without foundations, but born precisely from the shared experience of being without meaning, from a last possibility of benevolence towards the other. This is a primordial and essential openness that is founded in our solitude and distance, but precisely on this founds a new “community”.

6. At the Bottom of the Human

In this deeply philosophical text, Sarah Kofman leaves any reference to speculative thought to help herself to the word of narration, a “writing of ashes” as she calls it, which signifies precisely in its consummation. What she seeks is a “word without power”, the opposite of the Begriff, of the violent, defining concept.

Blanchot, already quoted in the opening exergue, outlines one of the book’s themes well.

The unknown, unnamed name. The holocaust, an absolute event in history, historically dated, that all-encompassing burn in which all of history was set ablaze, where the movement of meaning was damaged, where the gift, without forgiveness, without consent, was ruined without giving rise to anything that could be affirmed, denied, the gift of passivity itself, the gift of that which cannot be given. How can this be preserved, even in thought, how can thought be made to preserve the holocaust in which everything has been lost, including the thought that preserves it? In the mortal Intensity, the fleeing silence of the innumerable cry.

[23] (p. 180)17

There is the necessity to narrate, the impossibility of doing so completely, but nevertheless also an ethical obligation towards those who have not returned. The shift that Sarah Kofman makes in this philosophical essay is interesting since she immediately takes as references for her own analysis two narrators, Blanchot and Antelme, who are, moreover, not Jewish, precisely to emphasize, once again, how the question of the Shoah is a question of all men as such [24] (p. 61). The shift to narrative language is important because Kofman recalls, through Blanchot’s words, the ethical betrayal of a certain kind of philosophical language, that of Heidegger, who used philosophy to support the erasure of the other [21] (p. 87). It is this high betrayal that needs to be healed, returning to the context of the field where language somehow returns to the pre-Babelian dimension, a mixture of different and distant languages, but where language as violence, that of the SS, is also affirmed.

In this analysis, the philosophical word itself is neutralizing because it tends to put in a logical sequence—erasing differences, unable to restore the human side—the uniqueness of suffering, therefore crystallizing all that has happened in a pacified vision. The fundamental requirement for the philosopher is, moreover, never to understand the story as pacification: there is no forgiveness. Forgiveness is, in itself, impossible. Blanchot’s short story, La folie du jour, to which Kofman particularly refers in this essay, shows us a world forcedly equal to itself, pacified through the erasure of diversity and distance, where the protagonist Louise comes to represent “the Apollonian law […] the living figure of death” [21] (p. 35)18. Blanchot describes a bright and orderly world that transforms during the night, revealing hidden suffering through incomprehensible screams and moans, a reduction to the inhuman. In all this, it is clear that “the misfortune of the story, inherent in its Apollonian happiness, is to mendaciously dissimulate Dionysus in his title of glory” [21] (p. 37)19.

This Apollonian and Dionysian make the inescapable Nietzschean background evident. On the other hand, Nietzsche is the one who did not fear storytelling, song and poetry as instruments of thought, the one who attempted to bring the Dionysian back into balance, bringing it to the surface again, after destroying metaphysics. He transformed philosophy into song, releasing the potential of metaphor [25]. For this series of reasons, I think I can presume that the analysis of this text has also a deep relation to the “death of God”. It is what remains of man after the death of God.

As Löwith teaches us with his innovative interpretation of Nietzsche, we may think that perhaps, for the German philosopher, what remains after the destruction of the metaphysical landscape, and of all the anthropological concepts derived from it, is precisely the natural man, who has become part of nature again with his peculiar diversity, a true “re-engagement” with the world [26] (p. 128), not a homogenization but a distinction arising from an ever-changing relationality.

Nietzsche had, in fact, well defined man as the not-yet-stabilized animal, capable of many things, of making promises and also of betraying them [27] (§ 62, pp. 55–57). The context of the concentration camp as we know it, also through Antelme’s testimony, is one in which the SS try to annihilate the humanity of their prisoners, taking away their name, form and the dignity of basic needs. However, Antelme himself shows us that there is still a chance left, in extreme misfortune, when man is almost reduced to nothing, a whispered word, a furtive gesture, the sharing of a crust of bread. And this shared word allows one, again, to stand, to remain alive, despite everything. It is the humanity of the human, the only remnant of destruction. Antelme also recounts the moments of sharing with other French prisoners, where language finally returns to being home, welcome, a place of hospitality. It is no longer the language of the executioner, and everyone, speaking their own language, becomes “me” again.

What Sarah Kofman emphasises is that this language does not serve to seek understanding but is rather a physical comfort. The comfort of the closeness of another human being who, by responding, recognises you as worthy of care [21] (pp. 61–63). Antelme is instrumental for Kofman to show—this is my interpretative proposal—from where the sense of the human is reborn again, without the need for any transcendence. Thus, we see our power of choice at work, that which distinguishes us as humans, as Nietzsche recalled, calling us “animals not yet stabilised”. This possibility makes us responsible for everything. Forever.

A body, by its mere presence, even in its lowest expressiveness (in its bodily needs), becomes an instrument of resistance, of reaffirmation of life that overcomes everything, offering support to the other. The resilience of the human being is proportional to the violence that affects him, and nothing can ever erase the difference between victims and executioners because “it is not based on a specific difference or a common essence, reason, but on a common power of choice, incompatible yet correlative choices, the power to kill and the power to respect, to safeguard the incommensurable distance, the relationship without relation” [21] (p. 79)20.

The prisoner’s furtive laughter reaffirms freedom with a gesture that totally erases all efforts of the logistics of death, showing what the Nazis want to deny, namely, that despite everything (punishments, fences, cruelty), everyone occupies the same land and fears the same things. In this way, the whispered word, the gesture or a simple nod, go on to reconstruct, once again, that language without power, capable of reconstructing the network of the human without imposing anything but seizing the need. In Antelme’s book, there are extraordinary descriptions of small gestures of humanity, which put life back into play again, nourishing hope.

This reduction to zero makes it possible to reconstruct a community that does not confuse roles but rather makes positions stand out precisely on the basis of that fundamental human characteristic, the power to fulfil the promise, that is, the responsibility towards the other.

Antelme’s book is therefore fundamental for Sarah Kofman, helping her to find meaning in the death of her father, struck down because he wanted to keep Shabbat, fulfilling his promise as a rabbi. In this extreme act, Kofman finds all the subversive force of the only freedom granted to man, that of fulfilling promises. Philosophy and life find their unity thanks to the ethical dimension of the language, which becomes the guarantee of action, becoming the meaning of existence, the indelible signature of one who has lived freely. This is why the father’s name in Klarsfeld’s list is that of a free man.

By sharing what man can do against man and the limits of this power (the irreducibility of man reduced to the irreducible), Antelme’s book authorises and invites us to do so. By showing that the dispossession of the object of which the deportees were victims signifies the indestructibility of otherness, its absolute character, and by establishing the possibility of a new kind of ‘we’, he founds without founding, because this ‘we’ is always already undone, destabilised, the possibility of a new ethic. Of a new ‘humanism’ one might say, if it were still permissible to utter this overused and idyllic word […] Man ‘after Auschwitz’? Indestructible. But this means that ‘there is no limit to the destruction of man’.

[21] (p. 82)21

This new humanity, unfounded and indestructible, which finds itself in the gesture, in the word as a place of danger, but also of welcome, of comfort, is surely without God and without home. Eternally in transit, founded on its own exile, where, however, it manages to rebuild something that preserves it despite everything. This is the humanity that has witnessed the death of God in every dead man.

After this magnificent and terrifying text, Sarah Kofman returns to her philosophical work by once again immersing herself in a particularly close melee with Friedrich Nietzsche, but also with Sigmund Freud [17].

Before concluding her existence and arriving at the little autobiography we started with, Sarah Kofman devoted herself to an analysis of Nietzsche’s autobiographical text, Ecce Homo, to which she dedicated two volumes entitled Explosion [28,29].

From Nietzsche’s thought, the philosopher inherits a style freed from the obligation of the system, which finds in the lack of a metaphysical horizon an element of great freedom. The dancing style of Nietzsche’s thought is also the ideal model for the French thinker, who is not intimidated by the lack of boundaries but explores new possibilities. Nietzsche linked this curiosity for the unexplored precisely to the nihilistic horizon of the death of God, in the aphorism preceding the famous 125 of Gay Science: “In the horizon of the infinite—We have forsaken the land and gone to sea! We have destroyed the bridge behind us—more so, we have demolished the land behind us!” [14] (§ 124, p. 119). From what we know of Nietzsche, surely the position is not accidental.

The nihilism with which Sarah Kofman has to deal is perhaps even more radical; it is the world after Auschwitz, a world in which not even storytelling is possible any more, no meaning can be preserved, but where, however, it is all the more necessary to speak using the right words, where it is necessary to reweave human bonds from below.

Significantly, it is precisely at this time that Kofman feels the need to return to Antelme’s text again, in a passage from his work on Ecce Homo. Speaking of The Dawn of Day and the transformation of a “new” humanity, one that is not prey to the false and misleading models of priests or philosophers, but also of scientists, who want to heal without mercy, cutting and mutilating, the philosopher inserts a page from Antelme’s book, within a paragraph with the significant title Taking Humanity Back into Our Hands [29] (pp. 225–234).

Between the priests’ ‘compassionate’ control over ‘humanity’, transforming it into a collection of ‘sublime abortions’, and the surgeons’ clean hands, which want to clean it up without mercy, is there not room for completely different hands? For a ‘third’ kind of ‘hand’ that would put an end to all manipulation… and to all apartheid, so that people, healthy and sick alike, could simply go hand in hand or shake hands, without fear of contamination and without any desire to take control? Would the principle of intelligibility ‘quest la volonté de puissance’ still be a ‘good’ principle for this third kind of hand?

[29] (p. 232)22

This third mode is that of Antelme’s human exchange, which Kofman presents through the famous final pages of The Human Race which, she writes in a footnote, “which must be read and reread at the same time as Nietzsche” [29] (p. 234 n.1)23.

Kofman returns to the simple gesture of sharing a cigarette in the dark night of the concentration camp, which Antelme recounts in the final part of the book. This powerful and banal gesture manages to thwart all logic of death, reaffirming life and its infinite power, beyond Nazism. In this gesture, we can see that something holds, despite everything. The telling of this also recasts the sense of all telling because it shows a humanity that does not disappear, that binds and connects, without any need to declare its belonging. Back to the sense of the earth, we also find ourselves in this small gesture.

Antelme writes the following:

• The cigarette is finished.
• I did not see him. Tomorrow I will not recognise him. The shadow of his body lies down. A moment passes. At the end of the bench someone is snoring. I lay down too. Nothing exists any more except the boy who cannot see me. I place my hand on his shoulder. I whisper to him:
• -Wir sind frei (We are free).
• He gets up.
• He tries to see me.
• He shakes my hand.
• -Ja. [30] (p. 306)24

One plunges into the pain of being together “in the field”, to find the lever that allows one to mock death, to reaffirm life, to laugh at death, life that overcomes and nullifies the nothingness of death and turns it into laughter. We know that this is precisely the “lightness” that Nietzsche attributed to the Greeks [14], that is, a showing that abandons the need to prove, opening up a new beginning where there seemed to be no way out.

In addition to this passage from Explosion, Sarah Kofman feels the need to add a post-scriptum to Stifled Words because Antelme now represents for her the counterbalance to a certain Nietzschean rigor. She titles it The ‘hands’ of Antelme.

While writing, these past two years, a book on Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, I could not stop thinking about these last pages of Antelme’s book. My reading of Nietzsche had to—it was a necessity and an obligation—be accompanied by a rereading of The Human Kind. To the agonal formula, which concludes Ecce homo, ‘Dionysus versus the Crucified’, I felt I should replace this ‘Antelme versus Nietzsche’, as if Robert Antelme had been for me the figure of a necessary anti-ideal.

[31] (p. 162)25

This is perhaps because, in Antelme, one can find a way to refound a new sense of humanity without resentment, a tetragonous vital resistance, devoid of even the last residue of voluntarism. Part of the reasoning she had proposed in Explosion returns in Kofman’s post-scriptum, but the philosopher adds, in an extremely significant way, a final passage. If Antelme’s are hands that have renounced all will to domination, no will to power can now be an acceptable model. Perhaps not even the Dionysian dance of Nietzschean philosophy.

Would the model of Gay Science, that of the loving dance of opposites who ally themselves, tenderly holding hands, yet without reconciling, be a better model, or perhaps Antelme’s gesture at the end of The Human Species is beyond any principle of intelligibility? And also of every model?

[31] (p. 163)26

7. A Few Final Considerations

I believe the reading I have proposed may highlight a real ethical proposal by Sarah Kofman. It is, as she suggests, a new form of “humanism”, a term used with great care, precisely because it is charged with a metaphysical history that makes it “unacceptable for us today—after ‘the death of God’ and the consequent end of correlative man” [21] (p. 93)27. Consciously for the philosopher, it is the death of God that marks the end of any possibility of foundation, of any solid structure, confronting us with the need to “return to the sense of the earth”, with Nietzsche and beyond him, to start again from that fundamental presence of the otherness of the other that cannot be erased, that is perceived, first of all, by the closeness of bodies. It is only these bodies, without any power, that can refound a new humanity, indelible and without any model.